Julie Henderson - Featuring Hanni El Khatib "Dead Wrong"

Born to a Palestinian father and Filipino mother, Hanni El Khatib
grew up in the heartland of half-pipe culture, the Bay Area. “San Francisco is the best place for burritos, skateboarding and hills,” El Khatib says. “The worst part is the crackheads and junkies that shoot up on your doorstep.” He’s spent as much time working on the bottom of a skateboard as he has on top. The graphic designer put in time at a few ad agencies before becoming creative director for the HUF skateboard company. He wrote his first song at age 13, a piano motif he believed to be the perfect sound track to some unmade movie. “It’s super epic,” he maintains. He still plays it whenever he sits at a piano.

Naturally, the album cover of a graphic designer-turned-rocker is going to be a mission statement. Look at the sleeve of Will the Guns Come Out, El Khatib’s debut. It’s is a dusty crime scene photo, the wreckage of a collision between a steel Cadillac and an Oldsmobile police cruiser. The cops come out on the losing end. This outlaw blues is hard and raw. It’s San Quentin music, rock and roll sawed off to it’s bare minimum. El Khatib needs nothing more than a white-hot guitar and a holler to raise goose bumps. He whittles Louis Armstrong and Funkadelic tunes into sonic bullets. Heartbreak Hotel, too.

In 2011 he hit the road with Florence + The Machine. Today El Khatib lives in Los Angeles, in a sturdy building constructed the 1930s, with “his lady,” his dog, Harlow, and several cats. If he could bring one thing back from the past, what would it be? James Dean? Demolition derby? Nah. “My cat Clementine,” El Khatib says. Like a switchblade comb, the tough-guy exterior reveals a more innocent inside.

Q & A with Hanni El Khatib

The first record you owned?

Beastie Boys, License to Ill.

Favorite Record?

One of the James Brown ones. Live at the Apollo 1962.

Your favorite beach?

Lanikai in Oahu.

Your worst experience on the road?

It’s a long story, but let’s just say it involves some vomit and three dudes packed in a van overnight in a parking lot.